I got a really good laugh when I spied this book sitting on my bookshelf while looking for my “Evidence in Negligence Cases” book written by New York personal injury trial attorney Tom Moore. I’d totally forgotten this book that I bought years ago while trying to figure out how to market myself online.

The subtitle is “The complete guide to creating winning ads,” by Kerry Randall and printed by the ABA Law practice management section. The really funny thing is I remember reading this book cover to cover,  marking it up, highlighting it and trying to use it to improve my Yellow Pages ad.

This is the stuff that the ABA printed to help lawyers learn how to market themselves. It was originally printed in 2002, thirty years after attorneys started using Yellow Pages to market themselves. Now that’s what I call being on the cusp of attorney marketing! (Notice the sarcasm?)

Chapter 20 is titled “Choosing your reputation: creating a memorable slogan.” Yes, that’s what attorneys need to set themselves apart…a slogan! It’s abundantly clear to me that the information contained within this book is so outdated and so irrelevant in today’s age of social networking and online marketing that I truly got a hearty laugh seeing this book hidden in my bookshelf.

As a year-end project I cleaned out more junk and got another laugh. When I went out on my own in 2002, one of the first marketing things I purchased was a program that my good friend Ben Glass refers to as ‘something that made me want to puke’. I agree. The advice being given in this attorney marketing program was basically a “call here for free cheesy report.”  When you gave your name,  the program urged you to  to bombard  that potential client with multicolored mail with time-stamped deadlines.  I’m happy to say that that program was ridiculous, and a great learning experience for me.

Bar associations today are supposed to help teach their members things that they didn’t teach you in law school. Since law schools neglect to teach lawyers how to market themselves, lawyers are left to learn how to figure this out on their own or be mentored by more senior attorneys. There are very few bar associations across the country that endorse and actively seek expert lawyer marketers to teach their members how to make money in the practice of law. Many lawyers still feel that marketing and advertising is not something a proper professional should do. Many of our bar associations feel the same way.

Unfortunately, that explains one reason why bar associations are so behind the eight ball when it comes to teaching attorneys how to effectively market themselves and make a good living in the process. Lawyers who recognize that marketing is crucial in today’s practice of law understand the importance of all the types of media that you can use and should be fluent in. This applies not only to solo practitioners and small law firms, but midsize law firms and even big law firms as well.

Yellow pages advertising is out. Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter are the standards by which most people in the 21st century are using to communicate their online message. Lawyers who wait for the next book from their local bar association or national Bar Association will be years behind and continue to wonder why their marketing is not really working.

So, if you want to get a really good laugh, clean up the junk in your bookcase, and realize that traditional forms of attorney advertising simply don’t work.

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To learn how to communicate effectively using the best tools possible, I encourage you to explore my blog here in the Lawyer’s Video Studio. To learn how really smart lawyers are using video to set themselves apart, I encourage you to read my new January 2011 lawyers video studio newsletter.

Have questions about creating video? Call me: 516-487-8207 or by email: Gerry@lawyersvideostudio.com. I welcome your call.

“Good Blogging Practices for Personal Injury Lawyers” — Eric Turkewitz from Nick Carroll on Vimeo.

Fellow New York personal injury trial lawyer Eric Turkewitz describes the pros and cons of blogging. For those of you who don’t know Eric online, he’s a very well-known blogger and you should check out his blog New York Personal Injury Law Blog. In this video presentation which he gave this past May, 2010, he explains what you should and shouldn’t do as a blogger.

Why does this help you as an attorney who uses video to market yourself? Everything that Eric talks about in this great presentation can be used when creating video. I highly recommend watching this entire video. It will make you a better marketer and open your eyes.

Traditional types of attorney advertising

When I first started to practice law I worked for a defense firm handling PI and medical malpractice cases on Wall Street in NYC. They also handled the occasional plaintiff’s case. There was a ‘feeling’ back then that attorneys that needed to advertise where ‘those kind of lawyers’ and generally looked down upon.

‘Those’ lawyers took cases that appeared to come from volume practices rather than quality cases. In other words, they took anything that walked in the door. ‘Those’ lawyers advertised. The traditional law firms relied on word-of-mouth advertising and didn’t need to debase themselves with an awful yellow pages ad that was not far from the plumbing ads. (I am sure that some lawyers felt the PI attorneys who advertised probably qualified to be connected to those plumbing ads).

In any event, I continued to wonder how the different law firms generated the calls to their office. I learned they came from word-of-mouth referrals; from defense attorneys who had opposed those same lawyers in court; from advertising in the yellow pages, in the local newspaper, classifieds, radio and TV.

I remember overhearing a conversation in the lawyer’s lounge in court one day. One lawyer was telling the other about a great new source of business. It was with a TV advertising outfit that had 6 lawyers in the same geographic area. Every call that came in rotated with the next attorney. I was intrigued. The lawyer he was talking to was from a traditional PI firm, and his reply said it all. “You advertise?” he stated with a tone that told you he disapproved.

When I went into practice on my own in 2002, I had taken all of my files with me and that kept me busy for quite a while. However, as my cases resolved, I became more and more concerned about where new business would be coming from. I was fearful that I’d be spending more time staring at my phone wishing it would ring. That’s when I realized I had to do something that would generate calls to my office.

What did I do? The same thing that most attorneys in my business did. Copied everyone else. I assumed that if firms were using the yellow pages, it must be working. I assumed that if lawyers were advertising on TV it must be working. Same for display ads in newspapers. Ah, I wish I knew then what I know now.

I took out a full page yellow pages ad. My ad was on page nine of the full page lawyer ads. It didn’t occur to me that a consumer would call all the other 8 lawyers ahead of me before ever calling me. The yellow pages rep didn’t fill me in on that little fact. That ad came with a bonus ad in a small local yellow pages. Big whoop. The ad cost me $25,000 for the year. Oh yeah; I let the yellow pages people design my ad. Wow, was I naive.

The rep’s pitch was “You just need one good PI case to pay for your ad, then the rest is gravy.” I got suckered in. The following year, the pitch was “Now you just need some color, or maybe a white background. Then we can put you into another major book and throw in some bonuses too.” I should have thrown her out, but hey, that one case paid for the ad and now I expected the next year’s ad to be even better.

What I learned was that lawyers who were taking out two full pages, known as double-truck ads were paying anywhere from $25,000 to $50,000 per year for their ads, depending on which books they were in. Then lawyers decided that double full page ads were not enough and went to FOUR full page ads. Who could keep up? Not me. I went looking for better ways to ‘advertise’ my legal services.

I tried TV ads, display ads and classifieds; all with mixed success. I was a solo attorney looking to stand out from the crowd. This just wasn’t cutting it. Yes, these efforts would make the phone ring occasionally, but not consistently. That’s when I came upon a few incredible people that changed the way I look at and approach attorney advertising.

The first was a guy name David Frey. He’s the author of the Small Business Marketing Bible. I had never bought an information marketing product before then and was hesitant to do so. I took the plunge and soon after received a looseleaf binder filled to the brim with content. When I went on vacation I was so fascinated by a concept he called education-based marketing that I read his book twice while on vacation. I took notes; underlined whole passages; highlighted others. I created a plan and when I returned, took action and began using David’s ideas to market myself.

He opened my eyes to something new and exciting. Nobody I knew was using the techniques he was talking about. At the same time, I came across a legal marketing guy named Trey Ryder. Trey also believed in education-based marketing and his marketing concepts fit right into David Frey’s. This was unbelievable stuff I was reading about.

Around that same time I came across a guy with a fascinating attorney website. He designed it like no other attorney website I had ever seen. It was educational. It had useful information on it. I was amazed. I called him up to talk and he was eager to talk and explain how he was using his website to attract potential clients. I was hooked. The attorney’s name? Ben Glass. Ben has since turned attorney marketing on its’ head by creating a powerful program called Great Legal Marketing based on the concepts he was learning and teaching other attorneys when I first met him years ago.

What was so amazing was that these people were not using traditional forms of attorney advertising. This was MARKETING through the process of educating. It was at that time that I started to create video to distinguish myself. I then got this crazy idea that if I combined this new video thing with education based video, it would set me apart from all my colleagues.

Guess what? It has. In fact, I got so good at creating educational video messages to market my law practice that people call me from all over the country and thank me for providing this information. Ironically, I don’t provide any legal advice in my videos.

After years of figuring out what works on video and what doesn’t, I decided I could help other lawyers market themselves the same way. Hence, the birth of the Lawyers Video Studio. This isn’t advertising. It’s using video to educate your viewer. As a byproduct of providing information, your viewer sees how knowledgeable you are. That’s not advertising; it’s marketing.

When lawyers hear how I help other lawyers create video, they always ask how I do it. Then they ask how I can do it for them. I have never encountered any attorney who mocked the type of video we create in the lawyers video studio. Why not? Because our videos don’t advertise like ‘those other lawyers’. We educate and that makes all the difference.

You missed my online webinar about the importance for attorneys to market themselves with online web video. That’s ok. You’re going to have another opportunity to listen in; once I get the mp3 recording, I’ll be posting that to The Lawyers’ Video Studio.

In addition, in today’s video and in a series of highlights from the webinar, you can listen in and actually see me giving my webinar presentation. I invite you to join me, for less than two minutes, to see how I started off.

By the way, you’ll see in the video that I’m wearing a telephone headset while giving the seminar, and I also have a wireless lavalier microphone that the video is picking up. Stay tuned for more.

By the way, one thing I ask. If you find that the material I post is useful and helpful, let me know either by a comment on the post, or even better, in the form of a testimonial. When you send me a testimonial I will include your name, contact info, photo and website, which gives you a back link to your website.

Thanks for taking time to read my blog!

The answer: No.

If I am a client, that would not be a very satisfying answer no matter what legal issue or problem I had. Obviously, no lawyer can guarantee a particular outcome even with a good case. But think about how an online viewer searching for an attorney would love to hear about guarantees that you can make to reassure them that you are confident and capable of guiding them through the legal minefield known as litigation.

Can you guarantee that you will do everything possible to achieve a successful result?
Can you guarantee that you will leave no stone unturned in doing legal research to put forth your best legal position when arguing your claim?
Can you guarantee that you will respond to your client within 24 hours of their e-mail or phone call?
Can you guarantee that you will know what is going on with your client’s case at any time, whenever they call?

Ethically, an attorney can never guarantee that they can achieve a particular result for their client. However, there are other guarantees that you can make to your client that will provide them with comfort and reassurance that you know what you are doing.

How can you use video to present those guarantees? Simple.

Come right out and tell your viewer, in plain English what you can and cannot guarantee. I would tell a viewer:

“By law, I cannot guarantee a particular outcome for your case. This is true whether I give 110% effort on your case or 75%. Even with an excellent case, there is no guarantee that we will win your case. What can I guarantee? I guarantee that when you call my office, I don’t have to go to a file cabinet to know what happened last on your case. I can guarantee that when you call, my secretary will not ask you ‘How do you spell your name’?”

“I can guarantee that I will respond to your e-mails and phone calls within 24 hours, unless of course I am on trial with another legal matter. I can guarantee that you are not simply a file number in this office, but someone who deserves the respect that you are entitled to. I can guarantee that if I do not know the answer to your question, I will make every effort to obtain the most accurate, up-to-date answer in the shortest time period possible.”

What do you think? You think that these guarantees will help a potential client looking for an attorney online distinguish me from every other lawyer out there? Do you believe that these guarantees are ethical and responsible statements? As always, before creating any “guarantee” make sure your statements conform to your state’s ethical rules and regulations. No hype, no puffery, and certainly, nothing untruthful. If I were you, I would come right out and say what you cannot say, to give viewers an understanding of what you are technically not permitted to say. Then I would go ahead and discuss those things that I am able to talk about.

Video creates a compelling way for you to establish your credibility, and “guaranteeing” something that you can control simply improves your credibility.

Thanks for taking the time to read my blog. Have a great day!
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Gerry is a New York medical malpractice and personal injury trial lawyer in practice for over 21 years. He has produced and created over 200 educational and informative videos to help consumers understand how lawsuits work in the State of New York. If you want to see how Gerry has used video to promote his own practice click here.

Gerry created the Lawyers’ Video Studio to help lawyers get onto video. To get started with creating video to market your legal services, Gerry offers a simple and cost-effective turn-key video creation system where he does everything for you except appear on camera, click here to learn more.